The central place of the city of Jerusalem within
Judaism hardly requires a demonstration. Regardless of
whether the Jews themselves actually inhabited it, or
rather longed to do so, such a centrality has been of key
importance since the construction of the Temple in
Biblical times, and particularly after the two occasions
in which it was destroyed. The first destruction, in 586
BC, led to the mass deportation of the Jews to Babylon,
while the second, in the year 70 CE, marked the beginning
of the Jewish Diaspora. Both episodes led to a long
history of exile that has partially come to an end since
the foundation of the State of Israel fifty years ago.

Before its destruction, the Temple of Jerusalem was
the symbol of Jewish unity. The liturgy was celebrated
with daily sacrifices administered by the priests (cohanim),
while large numbers of Levites performed songs and
instrumental music. The destruction of the Temple caused
a complete reshaping of the religious cult. Daily prayers
replaced the sacrifices, while the synagogues  once
simply houses of study  became the only places of
worship. Instrumental music was completely banned from
all religious manifestation with the exception of the shofar,
a horn mentioned in the Bible used on solemn occasions
and for the gathering of the people at war. The shofar
is still blown today on New Year's Day (rosh hashanah)
and on the Day of Atonement (yom kippur).

The grandeur of the Jewish national past became
extreme poverty in exile: the original unity gave way to
a multiplicity of places and rites. All the principal
aspects of Jewish life were structured around a place and
an epoch that no longer existed in reality, but that had
become an even more powerful pole of attraction from
exile. Many new prayers, as well as liturgical and
paraliturgical poems (piyyutim), were composed
throughout Jewish history to celebrate Jerusalem from
this perspective.

Synagogue

Torah

The only testimony of the former unity
that was left to the Jewish people were the Five Books of
Moses the torah  which up to this day
provide the basis for the religious, moral, and legal
conduct (as well as the main source of inspiration for
any artistic manifestation) within the traditional
boundaries of the Jewish communities. The torah
had been read in public  that is, in the towns,
villages, and the marketplaces of Palestine 
already since the fifth century BC, following a practice
attributed to the Scribe Ezra. Out of this
long-established custom originated the cantillation
of the Hebrew text, which to this day constitutes the
main performing practice of synagogue vocal music. The
Jewish cantillation was set to a systematic order in the
post-Talmudic period (i.e., after the sixth century CE)
by a school of grammarians called massorah
("[transmitted] tradition"). These scholars
established meticulous rules that govern the vocalization
of biblical Hebrew, the syntactical ordering of the
verses, and the distribution of a fixed number of melodic
formulae among the words of the text. These rules are
indicated by a system of signs called teamim
(taam means "taste" as well as
"reason"), applied to the Hebrew text. Although
they do give musical indications, the teamim
are merely a symbolic reminder of the melodic formulae,
and not a notation. The actual melodies used for the
reading of the torah are part of an orally
transmitted tradition. Moreover, the massorah
 which plays a central role in synagogue song still
today  was established long after the second
destruction of the Temple, at a time when presumably most
Jewish communities of the Diaspora had already developed
autonomous melodic renditions of the torah that
were often based on local, non-Jewish musical traits.
Altogether, we can assume that the teamim
system was not elaborated with the purpose of unifying
the local musical traditions of each and every Jewish
community, but rather as a unifying principle for
governing the relationship between text and music.
"Jewish music" as we know it today 
without considering the music of the Temple, of which we
only have literary accounts  is from its very
origins a complex and variegated synthesis of local and
distinct Jewish musical traditions that influenced
each other only rarely, while they shared the same
paradigm of the text/music relation codified by the massorah.

Amongst the oldest musical traditions that still bear
traces of how the torah was sung in ancient
Palestine, we find today the sacred songs of the
Samaritans. A small community (now reduced to less than
one hundred people), the Samaritans have kept their
traditions alive through time, thus creating a religion,
language, and liturgy that closely resemble those of
standard Judaism, while also differing from it on many a
custom and exhibiting peculiar traits. One of their most
powerful liturgical pieces is a polyphonic version of
Moses song from the Exodus, Az yashir Moshe,
sung at yom kippur.

The city of Jerusalem holds a special place in Jewish
music for yet another reason. It was in Jerusalem that
modern Jewish ethnomusicology was conceived by the
eminent scholar Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1884-1938). This
could have happened only in modern Palestine, as a
by-product of the Zionist movement that since the end of
the last century had sought to reunify all the Jews of
the Diaspora under a new nation in the ancient land of
Israel. By the first decades of the 20th
century, Jerusalem, which had never ceased to attract
small numbers of Jews throughout the centuries, had
become a haven for Jewish groups coming from almost every
corner of the vast Jewish world. Only by carefully
listening to the wide variety of Jewish musical
traditions, all represented in the same city, was A. Z.
Idelsohn able to conceive the extensive fieldwork and
comparative study that culminated in a musical thesaurus
(Hebräisch-orientalischer Melodienschatz, 10
vols., 1914-1932) and in a comprehensive book, Jewish
Music in its Historical Development (1929).

The creation of the State of
Israel in 1948 strengthened the cohabitation of a
multicultural Jewish population in the land. Distributed
in several immigration waves, Jews from every country
settled in the new State, also bringing their languages,
their customs, and of course their peculiar musical
traditions along with them. For many years, however, the
main concern of the newly founded nation was to provide
the immigrants with the basic standards of a common life
and to integrate them under the new identity of
"Israelis". This attitude often led the new
immigrants  such as the Yemenites and the Iraqis in
the 50s and especially the Ethiopians in the
80s  to neglect their traditions, that were
left for the elders of the communities to be preserved.
Only in more recent years did liturgical traditions
become a public concern, and received some of the
attention they deserved. The State of Israel is the only
place in the world where the widest variety of Jewish
musical traditions can be heard  usually by the
finest performers  within their original (or
originally reconstructed) context. As Edwin Seroussi
(Bar-Ilan University, Israel) underlines in his notes to
the CD Jerusalem in Hebrew Prayers and Songs,
"all the singers in this recording are genuine
representatives of their respective traditions, i.e.
either active cantors of synagogues or folk singers of
modern communities in Israel".

Given the high social position that the ashkenazi (i.
e. from central and eastern Europe) community has held in
the state of Israel, and its large presence in the USA
(despite being annihilated by the Nazis in Europe during
WWII), its musical traditions are among the most
"institutionalized" in the country. The
liturgical repertoire has been codified and often
composed throughout, during our century, by some very
popular hazzanim ("cantors"), such as
Yossele Rosenblatt (1880-1933) or Gershon Sirota
(1874-1943). Cantor Shalom Rakovsky, from Jerusalem, is
one of the finest and most learned performers of this
repertoire, as he shows in one of Sirotas most
famous pieces (from the liturgy of the shabat), Retze
Adonai elohenu be-amkha.

However, the ashkenazi traditions are altogether not
the most relevant in Israel today. Many non-European
traditions are extremely well represented, because their
original context  implying a certain level of
integration between the religious and the secular spheres
 has been more easily preserved in the heart of the
Middle East than the context of the European traditions.
For example, the nearby Turkish tradition of sephardic
origins (that is: from the Iberian peninsula, where Jews
were present until they were expelled in 1492), but often
based upon Turkish maqamat, is quite well
preserved. The CD has a few tracks sung by the Turkish hazan
Jakob Kohen, including a version of the hymn Lekha
dodi (written in the 16th
century by Rabbi Shlomo ha-Levi Alcabetz, from Saloniki),
from the kabalat shabat liturgy of Friday night:

Very popular in today's Jerusalem is the ritual of the
baqashot, that is, hymns and prayers performed at
night during the weeks preceding the High Holidays (rosh
ha-shanah and yom kippur). These ceremonies,
which are full of mystical allusions, originated in
Aleppo, Syria, but soon spread to Morocco, and eventually
influenced the cabalistically oriented confraternities in
18th-century Italy. By the turn of
the 20th century the baqashot
had become a widespread religious practice in several
communities of Jerusalem as a communal form of prayer. It
included several performers and solo-singing alternating
during the long performances, or in small choirs, as in
the piece El mistater beshafrir cheviyon (by the
cabalistic poet Rabbi Abraham Maimin, 17th
century).

Finally, Jerusalem  or, in case a trip to Israel
does not fit into the reader's plans, a CD like the one
reviewed here  has become the most important place
in which it is possible to hear some quite unknown, and
very little popularized, Jewish musical traditions, such
as the Kurdish one. This is well represented here by two
songs, including the widely known (when set to
non-Kurdish melodies, of course) sabbatical table song,
or zemirah, Zur mi-shelo achalnu, as well
as by melodies that became big "hits" in the
general music market and are known to a much larger
public.

Such is the case of the traditional song Im
ninalu, based on a text of the Jewish-Yemenite diwan
by Rabbi Shalem Shabazi (17th
century) and made quite popular in the late 80s as
a dance song performed by the famous pop-singer of
Yemenite origins Ofra Chaza.